It seemed to me that the time had come for a heart-to-heart talk with him. I resolved to be very careful, for I was dealing with perilous stuff. If he was in love with Verona I dared not speak my mind, and even if there was no love, there were deep obligations of gratitude.
He dined with me at the House on the evening of June eighth, and afterwards we talked in a corner of the terrace. His looks made me uneasy, for he seemed both listless and restless. He kept looking nervously about him, as if at any moment something hostile might attack him. He had the air of a smallish rabbit caught in a largish trap.
But it was a stoical rabbit, for to me he made no complaint. In a leaden voice he announced that he was the most fortunate of men. His business was flourishing, and in the autumn it was proposed to form a company . . . At last he had found a vocation in life. Yet there was as much conviction in his voice as in the babbling of a sleepwalker.
I asked him baldly when he was going to be married. In even tones he replied that nothing had as yet been settled. But the form of his answer implied that something would soon be settled. I forbore to enquire further, for his gaze was fixed glassily on the tower of Lambeth Palace.
Then of his own accord he asked me what I had thought of the prospectus. I hastily resolved that no good could come of candour. Reggie had made his bed and meant to lie on it, and it was not for me to put in extra thorns.
“Very well done,” I said; “what the Germans call appetitlich. It should give you an excellent send-off.”
“You didn’t think it vulgar?”
“Not a bit,” I lied. “Half-tones and broken lights won’t do in business. You must be emphatic.”
He nodded. “I agree with you. She wrote it, you know. Michael revised it, but in substance it was her work.”
I said something silly about having detected the finer female touch. Then he rose to go—he had an appointment with an American at the Savoy. It had been the most hopeless evening, for I had never come near him. He seemed to be separated from me by a vast thicket, and I felt that if I laid an axe to the bushes they would scream like mandrakes.
When we said goodbye, I felt a sudden wave of liking and pity. I patted him on the shoulder. “I hope you’re going to be very happy, old man,” I said, but he made no answer.
As I went back to my rooms I suddenly thought with grim amusement of what had happened at Flambard a year before. That story, so far as Reggie was concerned, was over. Youth’s infinite choice of roads had given place to a rigid groove, presided over by a relentless marmoreal blonde.
Chapter 7
But I was wrong. It may have been merely the sight of me as part of his old life, or it may have been my last words, but something that night brought Reggie to breaking point. When he got home he rang up Tallis at Libanus, found that he was in London, ran him to ground at the Travellers’, and arranged to meet him the following morning. I do not know why he turned to Tallis, except that it was at his house that he had first met Verona, and that he seemed to stand for him on the dividing line between a world which he had loved and a world which he had come to hate and fear.
Tallis told me this part of the story. They lunched together, and talked afterwards beside the fireplace in the hall. He had not seen Reggie for nearly six months, and was shocked at the change in him. As he expressed it, Reggie’s coat was all sulky and his body like a cab-horse.
According to Tallis, Reggie plunged at once into his tale, telling it with a kind of angry vehemence, rather dim about details, but desperately clear on the main points. He had lost everything he cared for in life, he said; he was involved in a juggernaut of a business, ground under a juggernaut of a family, and about to be tied up for life to a juggernaut of a girl. This last he only implied, for he spoke no disrespectful word of Verona.
“You haven’t proposed to her?” Tallis asked.
Reggie said he hadn’t, but that everybody expected him to, including, he feared, the lady herself. There was to be a Cortal family dinner the following night, and it had been gently but firmly hinted to him that that would be a fitting moment to announce the engagement.
“I gather that you’re not in love with her?” said Tallis.
Reggie looked wooden. He was trying to live up to his code. “I admire her immensely,” he stammered. “And I’m grateful to her— far more grateful than I can ever express—I owe her a tremendous lot . . . She has worked like a slave for me—given up most of her time—oh, she’s a marvel! Unselfish, too . . . Nobody has ever taken such an interest in me . . .”
“I know, I know. But do you love her?”
Then, just as an ice jam cracks on a river, Reggie’s decorum went with a rush.
“No, by God,” he cried wildly. “I don’t love her! And she doesn’t love me. She has taken me up, and she’ll stick to me till I’m in my grave, but she doesn’t love me. She couldn’t love anybody—not made that way. I’m only her business partner, the thing she needed to round off her life . . . Love her! O lord, I’m nearer hating her. I’m in terror of her. She mesmerizes me, like a stoat with a rabbit. She has twenty times my brains, and I’ve simply got to do as I’m told . . . And then there’s her awful family. I’m lapped in them, suffocated by them. I loathe her infernal apes of brothers—they’re so cursed gentlemanlike and efficient and patronizing. Dash it all, man, there are times when I can scarcely keep from hitting their blinking faces.”
He dragged a paper from his pocket, and flung it at Tallis.
“There’s worse still. Look at that. Read it carefully and smack your lips over its succulent beastliness. That’s the Cortal idea of what I’m going to give my life to. That’s the prospectus of my business. The ‘Interpreter’s House,’ by God! It has interpreted them to me all right. Do you grasp the perfect hell of it? I’m to spend my days with the things I thought I cared about, but the gloss is rubbed off every one of them. I’m to be a sort of Cook’s guide to culture on a sound commercial basis. Damn it, I’d rather clean out drains in Chicago, for then I should know that there was a jolly world to which I might some day return. But it’s just that jolly world that’s been blasted for me.”
He dropped his head on his hands and groaned.
“There’s no way out except to cut my throat, and that wouldn’t be playing the game. I suppose I must go through with it. I mustn’t behave like a cad . . . Besides, I daren’t. I simply haven’t the nerve.”
Tallis was smiling cryptically.
“Funny you should tell me this. For the same thing happened to me about a quarter of a century ago.”
Reggie looked up quickly. “Gospel truth?” he asked.
“Gospel truth. She was an American—from Philadelphia—very pretty, and sweet, and sticky as barley sugar. She had a family, too, just like the Cortals, and she had a business mind. She took me up, and meant to run me, and at first I was fascinated. Then I saw that it would mean Gehenna—Gehenna for both of us.”
“What did you do?” The question came like a pistol crack.
“I did the only thing. Ran away and hid myself. Very far away—to western Tibet. I thought at the time that I was behaving like a cad, but now I know that it would have been far more caddish to have gone on. Marriage by capture doesn’t suit people like you and me.”
Reggie stared.
“I am not going to Tibet,” he said. He had forgotten all about Moe and Flambard, but something remained by way of an inhibition against the Orient.
“No need to. The world is wide. There’s plenty of other places.”
Tallis rose and rang a bell.
“I’m an abstemious man,” he said; “but I always drink brandy in moments of crisis. This is a crisis for you, my lad, and I’m going to take charge of it. You must run away and hide, like a little boy. It’s the only thing to do, and it’s also the wisest and the most courageous thing. Cut the painter, burn the ship, hew down the bridge behind you.”
/> There was light in Reggie’s dull eyes.
“Where shall I run to?” he asked, and his voice had lost its flatness.
“Come with me,” said Tallis. “I’m off tomorrow morning, and shall be away for the better part of a year. I have a bit of work to do before I can finish my book. I have shut up Libanus and sent my valuables to the bank. We go up to Liverpool tonight, so you will just have time to make your arrangements.”
“I’m not going east,” said Reggie, as the vague recollection rose again in him.
“No more am I. I am going west.”
Tallis fetched a sheet of club notepaper on which he wrote with a fat gold pencil.
“We must proceed according to Cocker,” he said. “No secret shuffling out of the country. This is an announcement of my departure which will appear in the press tomorrow, and I have added your name. It is your Declaration of Independence to all whom it may concern. Also you are going straight from here to see Verona and tell her. That will correspond to the tea chests in Boston Harbour. The train for Liverpool leaves at ten minutes past seven. We can dine on it.”
“What shall I say to her?” Reggie faltered, but not as one without hope.
“That’s your concern. You will find words if you really mean business. You are improving on my conduct, for I never made my adieux to the lady, but then Verona has done a good deal for you, and she is old Jim Jack’s niece. After all, it’s a kindness to her, for a girl with her brains can do better for herself than a chap like you. When you get home, you’ll find that she has espoused some appalling magnate.”
Reggie was on his feet, his lassitude gone, his shoulders squared. He spruced himself up with the help of an adjacent mirror, and his movements were brisk.
“Right,” he said. “The 7:10 at Euston. I needn’t take much luggage, for I can buy what I want in . . .” He stopped short. “New York is no good. I can’t hide myself there. The Cortals know half the place, and those blighted brothers are always hopping over.”
Tallis was paying for the brandy.
“You needn’t worry about that,” he said. “New York is only our jumping-off point. We are bound for farther south . . . Central America . . . a place called Yucatan.”
Part Five
Sir Robert Goodeve
Epigraph
“A covert place
Where you might think to find a din
Of doubtful talk, and a live flame
Wandering, and many a shape whose name
Not itself knoweth, and old dew,
And your own footsteps meeting you,
And all things going as they came.”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Portrait”
Chapter 1
For five months after that Whitsuntide at Flambard I saw and heard nothing of Goodeve. But I could not get him out of my mind, for of all the party he had struck me as the one to whom the experience meant the most, the one who had been the most tense and expectant. Whatever he had seen on the phantasmal Times page of a year ahead he would take with the utmost seriousness. I liked him so much that I was a little anxious about him. He was finer clay than the others.
My own attitude towards Moe’s experiment varied during these months. Sometimes I was inclined to consider the whole thing the vagary of a genius gone mad. But there were moments when I remembered his brooding pits of eyes and the strange compulsion of his talk, and came again under his spell. I made an opportunity to see Landor—the man I had telephoned from Flambard before my first conversation with Moe—and tried to discover what substance a trained scientist might find in Moe’s general theory. But Landor was not very helpful. The usual reaction had begun, and I gathered that at the moment the dead man had more critics than followers. Landor declared that he did not profess to understand him, but that the common view was that the speculations of his last years had been a sad declension from his earlier achievements in physics and mathematics. “It is the old story,” he said. “Age means a breaking down of partition walls, and the imagination muddies the reason. Moe should have ended as a poet or a preacher. He had got a little beyond science.” I tried to put limpingly Moe’s theory of time, and Landor wrinkled his brows. “I know that there are people working on that line,” he said, “but I don’t think they have made much of it. It’s rather outside my beat. More psychology than physics.”
This conversation did little to reassure me. So far as Goodeve was concerned, it was not the actual validity of Moe’s doctrine that mattered, but his own reactions to the experience. And an incident in the last week of October rather shook the scepticism which I had been trying to cultivate. For I opened the newspaper one morning to learn that young Molsom had been appointed a lord of appeal straight from the Bar, a most unexpected choice. Yet I had expected it, for in my efforts to throw my mind a year forward under Moe’s direction I had had a vision of the future House of Lords tribunal. The figure on the Woolsack had been blurred, but Molsom had been perfectly clear, with his big nose and his habit of folded arms.
In the beginning of November Sir Thomas Twiston died, and Goodeve, the prospective candidate, had to face a by-election. The Marton division of Dorset was reckoned one of the safest Tory seats in the land, but this contest had not the dullness of the usual political certainty. Goodeve was opposed, and though the opposition was futile, the election gave an opportunity for some interesting propaganda. It fell just after Geraldine had concluded his tour in the North, where he had made a feature of unemployment and his new emigration policy—a policy which, as I have already mentioned, was strongly disliked by many of his own party. Goodeve, who had always been an eager Imperialist, saw his chance. He expounded his leader’s views with equal eloquence and far greater knowledge. The press reported him at length, for his speeches were excellent copy; he dealt wittily and faithfully with both Waldemar and the Liberals and the “big business” group in his own party. Before the contest was over he had become a considerable personality in politics.
In fulfilment of an old promise I went down to speak for him on the eve of the poll. We had three joint meetings, and I was much impressed by his performance. Here was a new voice and a new mind, a man who could make platitudes seem novelties, and convince his hearers that the most startling novelties were platitudes. He looked vigorous and fit, and his gusto seemed to dispose of my former anxieties.
But at the hotel on the evening of the election day I realized that he had been trying himself high. His fine, dark face was too sharp for health, and his wholesome colour had gone. He was so tired that he could scarcely eat a mouthful of supper, but when I wanted him to go to bed he declared that it was no good, since he could not sleep. He kept me up till the small hours, but he did not talk much—not a word about the election and its chances. Next day he looked better, but I was glad when the declaration of the poll was over. He was in by an immense majority, nearly fourteen thousand, and there was the usual row in the streets and a tour of committee rooms. I had meant to get back to town for luncheon, but something in his face made me change my plans. “Won’t you spare me one night?” he begged. “Come back with me to Goodeve. I implore you, Leithen. You do me more good than anybody else on earth, and I need you to help me to recover my balance.” I could not resist the appeal in his eyes, so I sent off a few telegrams, and in the late afternoon escaped with him from Marton.
It was a drive of about forty miles through a misty November twilight. He scarcely uttered a word, and I respected his mood and also kept silence. The man was clearly dog-tired. His house received us with blazing fires and the mellow shadows of the loveliest hall in England. He went straight upstairs, announcing that he would have a bath and lie down till dinner.
At dinner his manner was brisker. He seemed to feel the comfort of release from the sickening grind of an election, and I realized that the thing had been for him a heavy piece of collar work. Goodeve was not the man to enjoy the debauch of half-truths inevitable in pla
tform speeches. I expected him to talk about politics, which at the time were in a considerable mess. I told him that he was entering Parliament at a dramatic moment with a reputation already made, and said the sort of encouraging things which the ordinary new member would have welcomed. But he did not seem much interested in the gossip which I retailed. When I speculated on Geraldine’s next move he yawned.
He was far more inclined to talk about his house. I had never stayed at Goodeve before, and had fallen at once under the spell of its cloudy magnificence. I think I used that very phrase, for such was my main impression. It had an air of spaciousness far greater than its actual dimensions warranted, for all its perspectives seemed to end in shadows, to fade away into a world where our measurements no longer held . . . When I had first talked with him at Flambard he had been in revolt against the dominance of the old house which was always trying to drag him back into the past, and had spoken of resisting the pull of his ancestors. Now he seemed to welcome it. He had been making researches in its history, and was full of curious knowledge about his forbears. After dinner he had the long gallery on the first floor lit up, and we made a tour of inspection of the family portraits.